Majority of Americans GLOOMY OVER FUTURE
Middle aged and older people most pessimistic, survey fi nds
Ask Americans to imagine life in 2050, and you’ll get some dreary visions. Whether they foresee runaway technology or runaway government, rampant poverty or vanishing morality, most Americans predict a future worse than today. Whites are particularly gloomy: Only one in six expects better times over the next four decades.
Also notably pessimistic are middle age and older people, those who earn mid- level incomes and Protestants, a new national poll finds.
“I really worry about my grandchildren, I do,” says Penny Trusty, 74, of Rockville, Md., a retired software designer and grandmother of five. “I worry about the lowering of morals and the corruption and the confusion that’s just raining down on them.”
Even groups with comparatively sunny outlooks — racial and ethnic minorities, the young and the nonreligious — are much more likely to say things will be the same or get worse than to predict a brighter future.
“Changes will come and some of them are scary,” says Kelly Miller, 22, a University of Minnesota sports management grad. She looks forward to some wonderful things, like 3D printers creating organs for transplant patients. But Miller envisions Americans in 2050 blindly relying on technology for everything from cooking dinner to managing money.
“It’s taking away our free choice and human thought,” she says. “And there’s potential for government to control and regulate what this artificial intelligence thinks.”
Overall, 54 per cent of those surveyed expect American life to go downhill, while 23 per cent think it will improve, according to a December survey from the AP- NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Only 21 per cent predict life will stay about the same. That minority may be onto something, however.
While no one can say what catastrophes or human triumphs are to come, contentment at a personal level has proven remarkably stable over the past four decades.
Interviews by the federally funded General Social Survey, one of the longest- running U. S. surveys of social trends, show Americans’ overall happiness as well as satisfaction with their jobs and marriages barely fluctuating since 1972.
Those decades spanned the sexual revolution and the women’s rights movement, race riots and civil rights advances, wars from Vietnam through Afghanistan, the birth of the home computer and the smartphone, boom times and hard times.
Despite the recent shift toward negativity, the portion of U. S. residents rating themselves very or pretty happy stayed around 9 out of 10.
“Most people evaluate their lives very stably from year to year,” said Tom W. Smith, the director since 1980 of the GSS, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago.
The GSS, conducted once every two years, will send interviewers back into the field in 2014.
The AP- NORC Center survey asked people to rate the change in American life during the period tracked by the GSS, from 1972 to 2012. A majority — 54 per cent — say U. S. life is worse today
Changes will come and some of them are scary.
KELLY MILLER 22- YEAR- OLD UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA SPORTS MANAGEMENT GRAD
than four decades ago. Those old enough to remember the early ’ 70s are especially nostalgic.
Those who say U. S. life has declined are more apt to name politics, the economy, moral values or changes in families as the biggest difference.
The three in 10 who think life is better are more likely to point to computers and technology as the big change.